Download or read book Representations of Islam in Travel Literature in Early Modern England written by Adam Galamaga and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2011-05-19 with total page 22 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seminar paper from the year 2010 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: gut, University of Frankfurt (Main) (Institut für England- und Amerikastudien), course: Early Modern England & Islam 1560-1640, language: English, abstract: The “troubles” with Islam in today’s Europe concerning legal and social issues are accompanied by stereotypical visions of the Islamic world. Stereotypes and prejudices play of course a certain role in every representation or vision of the Other. In regard to Islam they are, however, of a particularly long and rich history. Already after one century from its emergence Islam was seen as a danger to Christianity. John of Damascus granted already in 8th century a complete, though totally ignorant view of the Muslim civilization. Muhammad was depicted by him as an Antichrist and he declared Islam to be a conspiracy against Christianity. The medieval reception of Islam is shown very accurately in the famous Divina Comedia by Dante, where the reader finds Mohammed placed nowhere else but in hell: “(...) see how Mahomet is mangled! Before he goes Ali in tears, his face cleft from chin to forelock; and all the others thou seest here were in life sowers of scandal and schism and therefore are thus cloven”. Untrue and unfair depictions of Islam in Europe are found in Catholic theology by Thomas Aquinas, who is still regarded by the Church as its most prominent philosopher. Ignorance about Islam may seem understandable as far as fear of religious challenge is concerned, since many critics of Islam felt it was their duty to defend the truth about God. Many of them depicted the Muslim culture in a completely wrong way because of the very fact that they had never been in real contact with that culture. More detailed investigations about what was behind the teachings would, however, needed to be based on direct encounter. Accounts on Islam based on personal experience would have been then at least more objective and neutral – but the opposite is the case. In the so-called travel literature depictions of Islam are full of bias, fears and unjust insinuations. The purpose of travel writing in early modern Europe was not to represent Islam as it was, but to prove the distinction between the good and evil, whereas Christianity was meant to be the good and Islam the evil. Representations or rather misrepresentations of Islam in English literature of the Early Modern Period in general and in travel accounts written in that time in particular are the subject of this paper. A general characteristic of travel writing on Islam is given, two selected accounts – by William Biddulph and William Lithgow – are discussed in a more detailed way.

Download or read book Early Modern England and Islamic Worlds written by L. McJannet and published by Springer. This book was released on 2011-08-29 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essays in this book analyze a range of genres and considers geographical areas beyond the Ottoman Empire to deepen our post-Saidian understanding of the complexity of real and imagined "traffic" between England and the "Islamic worlds" it encountered and constructed.

Download or read book Islam and Early Modern English Literature written by Benedict S. Robinson and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-12-17 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book traces the process through which authors like Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton adapted, rewrote, or resisted romance, mapping a world in which new cross-cultural contacts and religious conflicts demanded a rethinking of some of the most fundamental terms of early modern identity.

Download or read book The Dialectics of Orientalism in Early Modern Europe written by Marcus Keller and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-11-09 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Uniting twelve original studies by scholars of early modern history, literature, and the arts, this collection is the first that foregrounds the dialectical quality of early modern Orientalism by taking a broad interdisciplinary perspective. Dialectics of Orientalism demonstrates how texts and images of the sixteenth and seventeenth century from across Europe and the New World are better understood as part of a dynamic and transformative orientalist discourse rather than a manifestation of the supposed dichotomy between the 'East' and the 'West.' The volume's central claim is that early modern orientalist discourses are fundamentally open, self-critical, and creative. Analyzing a varied corpus-from German and Dutch travelogues to Spanish humanist treaties, French essays, Flemish paintings, and English diaries-this collection thus breathes fresh air into the critique of Orientalism and provides productive new perspectives for the study of east-west and indeed globalized exchanges in the early modern world.

Download or read book Telling True Tales of Islamic Lands written by Julia Schleck and published by Susquehanna University Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book India in Early Modern English Travel Writings written by Rita Banerjee and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-07-15 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Comparing the variant ideologies of the representations of India in seventeenth-century European travelogues, India in Early Modern English Travel Narratives concerns a relatively neglected area of study and often overlooked writers. Relating the narratives to contemporary ideas and beliefs, Rita Banerjee argues that travel writers, many of them avid Protestants, seek to negativize India by constructing her in opposition to Europe, the supposed norm, by deliberately erasing affinities and indulging in the politics of disavowal. However, some travelogues show a neutral stance by dispassionate ethnographic reporting, indicating a growing empirical trend. Yet others, influenced by the Enlightenment ideas of diversity, demonstrate tolerance of alien practices and, occasionally, acceptance of the superior rationality of the other's customs.

Download or read book A Companion to the Global Renaissance written by Jyotsna G. Singh and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2021-04-26 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A COMPANION TO THE GLOBAL RENAISSANCE An innovative collection of original essays providing an expansive picture of globalization across the early modern world, now in its second edition A Companion to the Global Renaissance: Literature and Culture in the Era of Expansion, 1500–1700, Second Edition provides readers with a deeper and more nuanced understanding of both macro and micro perspectives on the commercial and cross-cultural interactions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Covering a uniquely broad range of literary and cultural materials, historical contexts, and geographical regions, the Companion’s varied chapters offer interdisciplinary perspectives on the implications of early modern concepts of commerce, material and artistic culture, sexual and cross-racial encounters, conquest and enslavement, social, artistic, and religious cross-pollinations, geographical “discoveries,” and more. Building upon the success of its predecessor, this second edition of A Companion to the Global Renaissance radically extends its scope by moving beyond England and English culture. Newly-commissioned essays investigate intercultural and intra-cultural exchanges, transactions, and encounters involving England, European powers, Eastern kingdoms, Africa, Islamic empires, and the Americas, within cross-disciplinary frameworks. Offering a complex and multifaceted view of early modern globalization, this new edition: Demonstrates the continuing global “turn” in Early Modern Studies through original essays exploring interconnected exchanges, transactions, and encounters Provides significantly expanded coverage of global interactions involving England, European powers such as Portugal, Spain, and The Netherlands, Eastern empires such as Japan, and the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal empires Includes a Preface and Afterword, as well as a revised and expanded Introduction summarizing the evolving field of Global Early Modern Studies and describing the motifs and methodologies informing the essays within the volume Explores an array of new subjects, including an exceptional woman traveler in Eurasia, the Jesuit presence in Mughal India and sixteenth-century Japan, the influence of Mughal art on an Amsterdam painter-cum-poet, the cultural impact of Eastern trade on plays and entertainments in early modern London, Safavid cultural disseminations, English and Portuguese slaving practices, the global contexts of English pattern poetry, and global lyric transmissions across cultures A wide-ranging account of the global expansions and interactions of the period, A Companion to the Global Renaissance: Literature and Culture in the Era of Expansion, 1500–1700, Second Edition remains essential reading for early modern scholars and students ranging from undergraduate and graduate students to more advanced scholars and specialists in the field.

Download or read book Early Modern Encounters with the Islamic East written by Sabine Schülting and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-29 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exploration of early modern encounters between Christian Europe and the (Islamic) East from the perspective of performance studies and performativity theories, this collection focuses on the ways in which these cultural contacts were acted out on the real and metaphorical stages of theatre, literature, music, diplomacy and travel. The volume responds to the theatricalization of early modern politics, to contemporary anxieties about the tension between religious performance and belief, to the circulation of material objects in intercultural relations, and the eminent role of theatre and drama for the (re)imagination and negotiation of cultural difference. Contributors examine early modern encounters with and in the East using an innovative combination of literary and cultural theories. They stress the contingent nature of these contacts and demonstrate that they can be read as moments of potentiality in which the future of political and economic relations - as well as the players' cultural, religious and gender identities - are at stake.

Download or read book Topicality and Representation written by Hammood Khalid Obaid and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2013-12-12 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book focuses on the importance of topical reading in understanding Islamic figures and themes, and applies this approach to two landmark Elizabethan plays: George Peele’s Battle of Alcazar and William Percy’s Mahomet and his Heaven. The former is the first English play to present a Moor as a major character, while the latter is the first English play to be based on Quranic material and feature the Prophet of Islam as a major character. In both plays, the book argues, topical concerns played a major role in the formation of Islamic characters and themes, rendering the term ‘representation’ highly debatable. The book also briefly covers other Elizabethan plays that contained Islamic elements, such as Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus and The Merchant of Venice, and Marlowe’s Tamburlaine and Doctor Faustus. Topical issues covered in the work include British-Muslim relations, the Spanish Armada, Elizabethan patriotism in literature, Catholic-Protestant tensions in the late 16th century, the gynaecocracy debate, and Elizabethan alchemy and magic.

Download or read book Writing the Ottomans written by Anders Ingram and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-07-24 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Histories of the Turks were a central means through which English authors engaged in intellectual and cultural terms with the Ottoman Empire, its advance into Europe following the capture of Constantinople (1454), and its continuing central European power up to the treaty of Karlowitz (1699). Writing the Ottomans examines historical writing on the Turks in England from 1480-1700. It explores the evolution of this discourse from its continental roots, and its development in response to moments of military crisis such as the Long War of 1593-1606 and the War of the Holy League 1683-1699, as well as Anglo-Ottoman trade and diplomacy throughout the seventeenth century. From the writing of central authors such as Richard Knolles and Paul Rycaut, to lesser known names, it reads English histories of the Turks in their intellectual, religious, political, economic and print contexts, and analyses their influence on English perceptions of the Ottoman world.

Download or read book The Representation of the Ottoman Orient in Eighteenth Century English Literature written by Hasan Baktir and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2010-08-01 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inspired by the growing interest in oriental countries and cultures, Hasan Baktir examines the representation of the "Ottoman Orient" in 18th century English literature, taking a new perspective to achieve a comprehensive understanding and investigating different aspects of the interaction between the Ottoman Orient and 18th century Europe.A number of questions continue to arise in the wake of Said's 1978 landmark study, "Orientalism". How monodirectional was the flow of power in such representations? To what extent did the travelling observer also participate and become influenced by the phenomena he tried to depict without attachment? What variety of motivations lay behind the desire to know and represent the Oriental other -- was it simply a question of political control? Or were there deeper, more enigmatic factors at play -- sexuality, existential affirmation, even utter idiosyncrasy? How various and diverse was the Western response to the East -- can we discern degrees of sympathy, knowledge, and difference in the various Orients offered to us by the canonical and non-canonical figures of 18th century English letters? Baktir's study provides answers to many aspects of these questions, through a detailed examination of very different texts.Baktir does not completely reject Said's argument that European writers created a separate discourse to represent the Orient; rather, he shows us that there was also a dialogic and negotiating tendency which did not make a radical distinction between the East and the West. Relying his argument on 18th century pseudo-oriental letters, oriental tales, and oriental travelogues, Baktir demonstrates that the representation of the Ottoman Orient in 18th century English literature differs essentially from earlier centuries because a developing critical and liberal spirit established a negotiation between the two worlds. In this book, he indicates how the critical and inquisitive spirit of the age of Enlightenment interanimated Oriental and European cultures.

Download or read book British Encounters with Ottoman Minorities in the Early Seventeenth Century written by Eva Johanna Holmberg and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-05-12 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: British travellers regarded all inhabitants of the seventeenth-century Ottoman empire as ‘slaves of the sultan’, yet they also made fine distinctions between them. This book provides the first historical account of how British travellers understood the non-Muslim peoples they encountered in Ottoman lands, and of how they perceived and described them in the mediating shadow of the Turks. In doing so it changes our perceptions of the European encounter with the Ottomans by exploring the complex identities of the subjects of the Ottoman empire in the English imagination, de-centering the image of the ‘Terrible Turk’ and Islam.

Download or read book Literature of Travel and Exploration written by Jennifer Speake and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-05-12 with total page 1425 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Containing more than 600 entries, this valuable resource presents all aspects of travel writing. There are entries on places and routes (Afghanistan, Black Sea, Egypt, Gobi Desert, Hawaii, Himalayas, Italy, Northwest Passage, Samarkand, Silk Route, Timbuktu), writers (Isabella Bird, Ibn Battuta, Bruce Chatwin, Gustave Flaubert, Mary Kingsley, Walter Ralegh, Wilfrid Thesiger), methods of transport and types of journey (balloon, camel, grand tour, hunting and big game expeditions, pilgrimage, space travel and exploration), genres (buccaneer narratives, guidebooks, New World chronicles, postcards), companies and societies (East India Company, Royal Geographical Society, Society of Dilettanti), and issues and themes (censorship, exile, orientalism, and tourism). For a full list of entries and contributors, a generous selection of sample entries, and more, visit the Literature of Travel and Exploration: An Encyclopedia website.

Download or read book Emissaries in Early Modern Literature and Culture written by Gitanjali Shahani and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-29 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With its emphasis on early modern emissaries and their role in England's expansionary ventures and cross-cultural encounters across the globe, this collection of essays takes the messenger figure as a focal point for the discussion of transnational exchange and intercourse in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It sees the emissary as embodying the processes of representation and communication within the world of the text, itself an 'emissary' that strives to communicate and re-present certain perceptions of the 'real.' Drawing attention to the limits and licenses of communication, the emissary is a reminder of the alien quality of foreign language and the symbolic power of performative gestures and rituals. Contributions to this collection examine different kinds of cross-cultural activities (e.g. diplomacy, trade, translation, espionage, missionary endeavors) in different world areas (e.g. Asia, the Mediterranean, the Levant, the New World) via different critical methods and approaches. They take up the literary and cultural productions and representations of ambassadors, factors, traders, translators, spies, middlemen, merchants, missionaries, and other agents, who served as complex conduits for the global transport of goods, religious ideologies, and socio-cultural practices throughout the early modern period. Authors in the collection investigate the multiple ways in which the emissary became enmeshed in emerging discourses of racial, religious, gender, and class differences. They consider how the emissary's role might have contributed to an idealized progressive vision of a borderless world or, conversely, permeated and dissolved borders and boundaries between peoples only to further specific group interests.

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment written by Valerie Traub and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-09-08 with total page 817 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment brings together 40 of the most important scholars and intellectuals writing on the subject today. Extending the purview of feminist criticism, it offers an intersectional paradigm for considering representations of gender in the context of race, ethnicity, sexuality, disability, and religion. In addition to sophisticated textual analysis drawing on the methods of historicism, psychoanalysis, queer theory, and posthumanism, a team of international experts discuss Shakespeare's life, contemporary editing practices, and performance of his plays on stage, on screen, and in the classroom. This theoretically sophisticated yet elegantly written Handbook includes an editor's Introduction that provides a comprehensive overview of current debates.

Download or read book Images of the Muslim Woman in Early Modern English Drama written by Öz Öktem and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2021-01-29 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Early modern scholarship often reads the dramatic representations of the Muslim woman in the light of postcolonial identity politics, which sees an organic relationship between the West’s historical domination of the East and the Western discourse on the East. This book problematizes the above trajectory by arguing that the assumption of a power relation between a dominating West and a subordinate East cannot be sustained within the context of the political and historical realities of early modern Europe. The Ottoman Empire remained as a dominant superpower throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and was perceived by Protestant England both as a military and religious threat and as a possible ally against Catholic Spain. Reading a series of early modern plays from Marlowe to Beaumont and Fletcher alongside a number of historical sources and documents, this book re-interprets the image of Islamic femininity in the period’s drama to reflect this overturn in the world’s power balances, as well as the intricate dynamics of England’s intensified contact with Islam in the Mediterranean.

Download or read book Greeks and Trojans on the Early Modern English Stage written by Lisa Hopkins and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2020-01-20 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No story was more interesting to Shakespeare and his contemporaries than that of Troy, partly because the story of Troy was in a sense the story of England, since the Trojan prince Aeneas was supposedly the ancestor of the Tudors. This book explores the wide range of allusions to Greece and Troy in plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries, looking not only at plays actually set in Greece or Troy but also those which draw on characters and motifs from Greek mythology and the Trojan War. Texts covered include Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, Othello, Hamlet, The Winter’s Tale, The Two Noble Kinsmen, Pericles and The Tempest as well as plays by other authors of the period including Marlowe, Chettle, Ford and Beaumont and Fletcher.